


The Third Night

by vintagecassette



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Dreams, First Kiss, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentioned Bianca di Angelo, Mentioned Tartarus, Nightmares, Panic Attack, Three Days in the Infirmary (Percy Jackson), solangelo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-25 23:07:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17130431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vintagecassette/pseuds/vintagecassette
Summary: Yet another iteration of those three days in the infirmary. Nico's nightmares after the war are plaguing the waking world around him, too, and Will Solace is the first to try and lend a hand.





	The Third Night

The Apollo healers had learned quickly enough that Nico couldn’t be kept in the infirmary’s main wing.

On his first night there, he’d accidentally summoned a skeleton in his sleep. A pair of Demeter girls in the cots next to him had screamed so loud, they’d woken up half the camp.

 _Hey!_ Will had shouted, bursting in and startling Nico into consciousness. The skeleton collapsed into a pile of bones the second he did. _What did I say? No more Underworld-y stuff until you’re better!_

 _It wasn’t on purpose_ , Nico insisted. It was doubtful that Will had even heard him over the Demeter girls’ persistent wailing.

They pulled a curtain around his cot the second night, hoping that sectioning him off from the rest of the wounded would be enough to keep his corner quiet. It worked pretty well — until around two in the morning, when all the shadows in the room snaked away from their sources and pooled around Nico’s bed. They swirled and undulated, knocking over tables and tearing the curtain right off its track, resulting in a series of crashes that sent the entire infirmary into chaos yet again.

Evidently blind to the danger, Will Solace had marched right through the ring of darkness and shaken Nico awake. The shadows froze, then dissipated, slinking away to reside once more under empty cots and in the cracks of barely-opened doors. Nico, breathing hard, had wrenched his shoulder out of Will’s grasp.

 _Pack up your stuff,_ Will had said. His voice was undeniably exhausted, but Nico couldn’t tell if its undertones were angry, confused, or something else entirely. _You’re moving upstairs._

Nico followed him with bleary eyes. His fingers tingled. He almost wished someone would turn on the lights.

The third night was hardly any better, but at least now he was alone. Will had talked Chiron into lending him a spare room in the Big House, which was dusty and silent and far enough from the infirmary that the Apollo kids were winded by the walk between them. (Apollo _kid,_ technically — Will was the only one who made the trek most of the time. Not that Nico minded.)

But yes. The third night.

Nico was dreaming, just as he had been each night prior. It wasn’t at all strange for demigods to have nightmares, but now, without a perilous quest or his impending doom at hand, Nico’s dreams were forced to pull from different source material.

He saw his mother leading him down the streets of Venice. Bianca was at his side, holding a cone of gelato, skipping through the sunlight that danced across the piazza. She turned around and smiled at him.

Then the dream shifted, and the sky went dark. The ground beneath his feet cracked, splitting apart as a dozen ragged fissures appeared along the stones. All around the piazza, people were running, screaming, being swallowed up by chasms in the ground. Bianca’s gelato fell from her grasp. Her eyes went wide with panic.

Less than a foot away from him, Nico’s mother shouted his name, and by the time he turned to look at her, it was too late.

The stones pulled apart at her feet. She vanished into their open maw.

“ _No!_ ” he wanted to scream, but his voice wouldn’t work. He lunged toward her just as the ground snapped shut and fell face first onto the stones. He scrambled upright to find that Bianca was gone, too. There was another fissure in the place she had stood. It was spreading toward him.

Nico ran as fast as his legs would carry him, but the fissure was faster. When he made to draw his sword, it wasn’t there. His feet were falling slower now; it was as if some invisible force was dragging him backward, toward the dozens of holes in the ground that were spreading so quickly they had nearly merged into one. With a terrible jolt, Nico realized just what that magnetic force was.

His legs fell out from under him, and he tumbled into the pit.

The force with which he hit the rocky bottom should have been enough to shatter his bones. His body stung with the sharp slice of a thousand shards of glass splitting open his skin. The air around him was unbearably hot; without even looking, he knew that the fires of the Phlegethon blazed somewhere nearby. No matter how hard he tried, he could never escape this place.

A booming voice echoed overhead. _Welcome back, son of Hades,_ it cooed, and in response, Nico’s voice finally returned.

He used it to do the only thing he could think of.

He screamed.

From seemingly nowhere, there was a crash. He stared wildly up at the blood red sky for the source of the noise. There came another, closer this time, and Nico spun in a desperate circle in search of its cause. The more he looked, the faster and louder the sounds came, again and again, all around; now someone was shaking him, hard, and he fought to get out of their grip. “Nico,” they were saying. “Hey! Hey, wake up!”

His eyes flew open, and the cacophony died away. He found himself flat on his back, lying in his borrowed bed, with a hand on each of his shoulders pinning him to the mattress. He sat up so fast that his restrainer stumbled backward and landed on the floor, where a shaft of moonlight from the window illuminated their face.

“Will?” Nico gasped, trying to stop the way his body was shuddering.

“Yeah.” Will braced his hands on the carpet and peered up at Nico in apparent confusion. “Sorry for shaking you like that. I didn’t know how else to wake you up.”

Nico just stared at him.

“Do you know what you were doing, by any chance?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Will let the corner of his mouth tip up into a smile. “I’ll take that as a no.” He gestured around him, and Nico drank in the scene.

To put it simply, the room was a mess. Books had been torn from their shelves and scattered about the room. The window had thrown itself open, and the curtains covering it had torn themselves halfway to the ground. Each bedside table drawer had been dislodged, spilling their contents all over the carpet. The only part of the room that remained intact was Nico’s bed.

“Oh gods,” Nico whispered. “I’m —” He was ready to apologize, but his voice faltered mid-sentence. Memories of his dreams had just rushed him all at once; he had no trouble understanding why the shadows had reacted to him so strongly tonight.

When he looked at Will, he saw that the latter’s smile had melted away, replacing itself with intense concern. “Nico?”

“Fine,” he blurted out. “I’m fine.”

Will eased himself up off the floor and sat beside Nico on the bed. “Everything you’ve been doing these past two nights,” he said. “You’ve been asleep during it?”

“I already told you it wasn’t on purpose.” He tried his best to sound composed, but his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. An attempt to take a deep breath devolved into a gasp and a cough.

“You should’ve said something,” Will told him, his tone bordering on stern. “If you don’t have any control over this, you could be overexerting yourself when you should be trying to heal —”

“Other campers had serious injuries for you to tend to —”

“This is serious, too!”

“Styx, Solace, just _shut up,_ ” Nico hissed, and Will did.

Nico tried to center himself with the silence. Memories were still flooding in — of Bianca, of Tartarus. It was all he could do to keep from yanking out his own hair. He felt a tugging sensation in his stomach, and when he looked up, he found that the shadows were once again creeping away from their hiding spots. To his right, the potted plant on his bedside table began to wilt. His breathing picked up its pace.

Will took note all of this as it happened. “Hey,” he said, “talk to me. What’s going on?” He reached toward Nico’s arm, evidently trying to comfort or ground him.

Nico recoiled. The darkness beneath the door rippled dangerously. Will pulled his hand away.

“Okay,” he said carefully. “No touch. No problem.” His blue eyes flickered over Nico’s trembling figure, but he couldn’t seem to parse out the best course of action. “Do you want me to stay?”

“No,” Nico said, his brain on autopilot. He cursed himself as Will nodded somberly and pushed himself to his feet. “N-no, wait, I mean — wait.”

Will paused.

“Don’t… go.” Nico hated how small he sounded, but it took all his willpower to get those two words past his lips.

“Okay,” Will said again. He scratched at the back of his neck. Took a tiny step forward. Took a tiny step back. “Can I…?”

Nico realized Will was gesturing at the edge of his bed. He nodded. Will sat down.

“You need to breathe.”

“I am breathing.”

“You need to breathe slower.”

Nico rolled his eyes.

“I mean it,” Will said. “Having a panic attack is not gonna help you get better.”

“I’m not —”

“Sick?” Will asked. “Or having a panic attack? As your friend, I can confirm that you are currently both of those things, and as your doctor, it’s my job to help you not be. Now — can I take your hand?”

Nico blinked, then pressed his fingers into an un-takeable fist. Hadn’t Will promised no contact?

“It’ll be easier if I’m able to touch you,” Will explained. “You know, direct healing energy and all that. But if you don’t want me to, I won’t.”

Two weeks ago, Nico would have rejected the proposition immediately. He would’ve fixed Will with the coldest glare he could muster and demanded that he get away. No contact. No letting anyone get too close. But now, after everything he did to get here… After how long it took him to decide he wanted to stay…

He released the fist and held out his hand. When Will took it, Nico struggled to keep from snatching it back — but after a few seconds, he could feel the warmth radiating from Will’s upturned palm. It was strangely soothing.

“Good,” Will said. His eyebrows knit together as he pensively rubbed a thumb over the back of Nico’s hand. “There’s still some residual darkness, just so you know, but I don’t think whatever’s been happening to you while you’re asleep is doing much damage.”

Nico struggled to focus on his words. His hands shook harder.

“Okay, sorry, back on topic,” Will said quickly. “I’m gonna have you breathe with me.”

That sounded a little ridiculous to Nico, but he didn’t have it in him to argue. When Will started to count down from four, then from seven, then from eight, he quietly complied. Even though it felt stupid at first, he slowly came to find that his heart rate was beginning to slow back to normal. He turned his back on the bad thoughts and focused on Will instead. He didn’t think much of it when Will shifted his hand slightly, leading their fingers to interlock rather than just overlapping. He closed his eyes and breathed.

“Feeling any better?” Will asked. It might have been seconds later. It might have been hours. He smiled when Nico inclined his head. “That’s great.” He let his eyes wander around the room for a bit, then seemed to decide upon asking a risky question. “Not to bring you back to a bad place,” he said, “but what got you so worked up?”

Nico shrugged. Now wasn’t the time to get into it. “Dreams.”

“Gotcha.”

They sat there for a while, fingers intertwined. Nico wasn’t even sure what time it was — he must have knocked the alarm clock off his bedside table — but he didn’t really care to know.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked after a while.

Will chuckled. “Because it’s my job,” he said. He elaborated when Nico shrank away from him. “And because I want to. Really. You seem like you’ve been through enough hurt for a lifetime, and… I just want to help ease some of that up.”

Nico opened his mouth to speak, but the air hitched in his throat. He tried again. All that came up was a sob. A tear worked its way free of his eye against his will. Then another. Then another.

“Whoa, hey,” Will said, reaching out and cupping Nico’s cheek in his hand. He brushed the tears away with his thumb, and for once, Nico didn’t even give the contact a second thought; he just let it happen. “Did — was it something I said? Gods, I’m sorry, I —”

He was cut off as Nico kissed him.

Gods of Olympus, it was like kissing the sun itself. Warm and kind and so, so bright. Will was smiling against his lips. There were no shadows in this kiss; only Will's blinding light. Nico had half a mind to just stay here forever.

Instead, he pulled away. The moment he did, he felt himself fill to the brim with confusion and shame. He drew his arms tightly around himself. “Sorry.”

“What?” Will shook his head. “Why are you sorry?”

“I shouldn’t have —” Nico exhaled hard and put his face in his hands. “I don’t even know if you’re — if you —”

He felt Will’s hands take each of his own and pull them gently away from his face. “If you’re asking what I think you are,” he said, “you definitely don’t have anything to worry about on that front. I am.”

An ounce of weight lifted itself from the thousand-pound mass that pressed down on Nico's chest. The rest of it still threatened to crush him.

“But I —”

“Don’t you get why I’ve been checking up on you so much?” Will asked. The ghost of a laugh bubbled under his words. “Why I made you stay in the infirmary for three days when I really only needed to keep an eye on you for one, just to be sure you wouldn’t run off and ignore me again?”

Nico’s brain wasn’t processing this. “You… what?”

“Dude.” Will was beaming. “You’re such an idiot.”

“Um.”

He was saved the effort of replying when Will kissed him. This time, Nico let himself bring a hand up to Will’s neck and run his fingers through his hair. This was, by far, the strangest thing he had ever done — and as a son of Hades, he had done more than his share of strange things. Will was smiling into the kiss again; to Nico’s surprise, he found himself smiling back. It was Will who finally pulled away, and when he did, he looked right into Nico’s eyes.

“Nico di Angelo,” he said. No elaboration, no speech. Just Nico’s name.

“Will Solace,” Nico replied.

For a minute (or an hour, or a year), they just sat there, drinking each other in as if for the first time. After what must have been forever, Will sat back into the pillows, lifting one arm just slightly. When Nico tipped his head to one side, Will raised his eyebrows, formally extending his invitation; and after a second’s pause, Nico slid under Will’s arm and lay his head on his chest. He could hear the son of Apollo’s heartbeat through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.

If all the suffering Nico endured had been what led him here, then maybe, he thought — just maybe — it might have been worth it.

He closed his eyes, and together, they fell into a dreamless sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure this type of fic has already been done a million times over, but I couldn't not write one myself. Feel free to let me know what you think!


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